Passport

In 1994-1995, in Luhansk in southeast Ukraine, social services began employing photographers to take passport photos in the homes of those who were elderly or ill. Alexander Chekmenev was one of the photographers commissioned for this extraordinary task. Witnessing how people were living out their final years made a very strong impression on him.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it became necessary in the newly independent Ukraine to replace old Soviet passports with the new Ukrainian ones. There was a rush to accomplish this in the shortest possible time. All Ukrainians had to get a new passport within a year. In 1994, the social services of Luhansk, a town in southeast of Ukraine, started offering photographers a job of shooting passport photos in homes of the elderly and ill citizens, who could not pay a photographer on their own. I was one of the photographers commissioned by the social services to go door to door during this national passportisation campaign.